"What Everyone Should Know about ASL and American Deaf Culture"
Corrine Occhino
Assistant Professor of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Syracuse University

ASL (American Sign Language) is experiencing a pop-culture moment. In the past few years, ASL has been visible in TV-shows, movies, commercials, and in sports and news broadcasts. ASL programs are popping up in schools and colleges all over the U.S. Despite dips in enrollment for many college programs, student enrollment in ASL classes is at an all-time high, as it has quickly become one of the most popular languages to take on college campuses. But despite its growing popularity, the hearing world knows little about ASL, its role in Deaf culture, its status as a real, human language, or the daily frustrations many Deaf ASL signers experience as they fight for access and inclusion in a hearing world.

In this talk I will take you on a whirlwind tour of ASL and the signing communities who use it. In the first half of my talk, I will discuss ASL's roots in Deaf Education and the role segregation played in the creation of ASL varieties. I will talk about the communities of signers who use ASL, why ASL is a Deaf language, and why language deprivation is still a very real problem for deaf children in the U.S.

In the second half of my talk, I will talk about some interesting linguistic properties of ASL and what research on ASL has taught us about language, and language learning. I will end with a discussion of how learning ASL opens the door to understanding Deaf culture, but also invites us to interrogate the ways we can disrupt the hegemony of hearingness, making way for a more inclusive and equitable society.

Bio: Dr. Corrine Occhino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics and in the Department of Teaching and Leadership at Syracuse University. Dr. Occhino received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of New Mexico in 2016. In 2017, she joined the Center on Culture and Language at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology where she ran the ASL Assessment Project. She now runs the Multimodal Language Lab at Syracuse University, where she uses a combination of corpus-based, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic approaches to study language in the visual modality. Most recently, Dr. Occhino has published articles on the phonological organization and structure of ASL, sociolinguistic variation in ASL, and on the role of experience and construal in ASL-English bilingual language processing. Dr. Occhino also works on issues related to language access and social justice, equity, and inclusion in deaf communities, collaborating on research projects aimed at improving reproductive health outcomes for deaf women and increasing the representation of minoritized dialects of ASL and their signers in the documentation and study of ASL.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom. Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events, which include wearing masks while indoors and providing proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test.

"Visualizing Black Lives: Representing Racism in Afro-Brazilian Media"

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Southern California.

Reighan Gillam researches the ways in which subjects experience, negotiate, and challenge stereotypical and controlling images. She examines these issues through the lens of Afro-Brazilian media producers in southeastern Brazil. She is currently working on a book manuscript, entitled Visualizing Black Lives, to understand how Afro-Brazilians turn to their racialized experiences as a source for visual content and the kinds of images they generate. In the Fall 2018, Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center named her the Peggy Rockefeller Scholar.

Education

Ph.D. Anthropology, Cornell UniversityB.A. Anthropology, University of VirginiaThis talk is co-sponsored by Africana Studies and Research Center. Thank you.

MartÍn Caparrós is a distinguished Argentine author, writer, and narrative journalist, and one of the fundamental Latin American voices of our time. In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot award by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, for outstanding reporting on America; specifying work on his nonfiction book-length work El Hambre (Hunger: The Mortal Crisis of Our Time, 2016), in which the author visits both the richest and poorest people of the earth in order to explore why hunger is one of today’s big unresolved issues. The book has been translated into 14 languages.

He was the recipient of the prestigious Herralde Prize (2011) for his novel, Living; the Planeta Prize (2004) for his novel, Valfierno; and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1994). He also writes biweekly columns for The New York Times and Spain’s El País. His expertise interconnects with a range of cross-disciplinary topics including inter-American dialogue, food insecurity, and climate change.

This event is part of Caparrós’s first visit as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large (ADW-PAL) to Cornell. His on-campus residency runs March 7-11, 2022. He was elected as an ADW-PAL in 2019. His appointment runs through 2025.

The talk will be in English.

Join the staff and students from the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement for a conversation with Dr. Agustín Cano Menoni, professor, extensionist and researcher at the Universidad de la República de Uruguay.

Dr. Menoni is visiting Cornell so we can learn from and with one another about Extension systems in the United States and Latin American tradition. We're excited to discuss how universities should engage with the community; what are the roles of faculty, students and staff; and what possible lessons and collaborations can emerge from a South-North dialogue.

RSVP by emailing Amy Somchanhmavong at ayk3@cornell.edu.

Co-sponsored by the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement, Polson Institute and Latin American and Caribbean Studies

See other events with Dr. Menoni

University-Extension in Dispute: Between the Market, the Public, and the Commons

Culture, Nation and the People: a Century of University Extension in Latin America

About Dr. Agustín Cano Menoni

Agustín Cano Menoni received his BA in Psicology from Universidad de la República (Uruguay), his Master in Social Project Management from LUMSA-Università (Rome, Italy) and his Ph.D. in Pedagogy from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He is currently a professor, extensionist, and researcher at the Universidad de la República de Uruguay (UDELAR), where he coordinates the Núcleo de Intervención e Investigación en Educación y Territorio of the Programa Integral Metropolitano of UDELAR. He is a graduate and postgraduate professor at the Institute of Education of the Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences of UDELAR, and a member of the National System and Researchers of Uruguay. He is the author of the book "Cultura, Nación y Pueblo: la extensión universitaria en la UNAM (1910-2015)", published in 2019 in Mexico by the UNAM, as well as numerous articles and chapters of books on topics of university extension and Latin American University.

Poised for Growth: Cohort Learning and Its Effects on Accelerated Startups’ Growth

Registration Link: https://cglink.me/2cm/r1538392

Startup accelerators have emerged as important loci for organizational learning among early-stage startups. These organizations use a cohort structure from which a focal startup can draw new knowledge, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends. We suggest that the quality and geographic diversity of a startup’s peers in the same cohort affect the value that entrepreneurs derive from accelerators and enable higher rates of post-acceleration startup growth. We use applicant-level data from 23,364 early-stage startups that applied to 408 accelerators in 177 emerging and developing economies across Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa between 2013 and 2019 and a matched case-control design to evaluate these cohort effects. Our results show that the quality and geographic diversity of peers in the same cohort were associated with higher perceived value among applicants from being in a cohort of like-minded entrepreneurs and higher rates of post-acceleration growth in equity funding, revenue, full-time employment, and wages paid among accelerated startups, compared to similar non-accelerated startups. These benefits varied widely across regions and programs and were greater for startups that had more traction and innovation coming into an accelerator.

Valentina A. Assenova is the Edward B. and Shirley R. Shils Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Her research centers on the formation, growth, and funding of early-stage firms, with a focus on emerging and developing economies. She has collaborated with organizations such as FINCA International and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation on projects and initiatives that advance entrepreneurship and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. She holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. from Yale University, an M.B.A. from the University of Cambridge, and a B.Sc. in Economics from the Wharton School.

Polson Institute for Global Development Seminar
A lecture by Agustín Cano Menoni

What is the relationship between universities and extension programs? How has this relationship, and the types of knowledge and practice traditionally conveyed by them, shifted under the pressures of globalization? Drawing on a range of experiences from Latin America, Professor Agustin Cano Menoni argues for the need to go beyond conventional views of the university as a neutral site of knowledge production, and extension programs as disinterested instruments for the dissemination of experimental knowledge. He calls for a critical rethinking and re-imagination of their interconnections at the interface between communities, the market, and the commons.

About the speaker:

Professor Agustín Cano Menoni received his BA in Psychology from the Universidad de la República in Uruguay, his MA in Social Project Management from LUMSA University in Italy, and his PhD in Pedagogy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is currently a professor and researcher at the Universidad de la República de Uruguay (UDELAR), where he coordinates the Núcleo de Intervención e Investigación en Educación y Territorio. He is the author of Cultura, Nación y Pueblo: La Extensión Universitaria en la UNAM, 1910-2015 (2019), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Latin American universities and extension programs.

About the Polson Institute

The Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Institute for Global Development supports theoretical and applied social science research. We fund projects and working groups that address issues ranging from economic inequality to discursive politics, contributing to Cornell’s leadership in global development.

Registration Link: https://cglink.me/2cm/r1537912

Julia Zhu is a PhD candidate in Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University.

On the move: How comparative immigration policies shape migration decisions in a globalized world

How high-skilled immigrants make migration decisions in the context of globalization? In these two papers, I demonstrate the importance of studying immigration policies in a comparative framework. In the first paper, I focus on the comparative immigration policies for international students in the U.K. and the U.S. I examine the causal effect of international student enrollment on college completion of U.S. domestic students by leveraging a restrictive immigration policy change in the U.K. that induced more international students from former British colonies to enroll in U.S. universities. Using newly obtained administrative data on all international students in the U.S. between 2003 and 2015, I find that an additional international student per program leads to 0.7 more domestic students to obtain a college degree four years later. The effect is concentrated in public four-year institutions. Additionally, I find positive cross-degree-level effect of international students in master's degree programs on U.S. domestic students in bachelor's degree programs. The positive impact is most likely through cross-subsidization of tuition, serving as evidence of resource effects. In the second paper, I focus on the comparative immigration policies for high-skilled immigrants in the U.S. and Canada. The current U.S. immigration quota system that imposes limits on the number of green cards based on nationalities has not changed since 1991, while demand has increased exponentially. This results in long wait times for individuals from high demand countries. For employment-based green cards, in recent years, college-educated workers from India need to wait for over a decade before submitting applications. In contrast, Canada has implemented several favorable immigration policies to attract high-skilled immigrants. I examine the effect of this immigration policy gap on immigrant inflows and labor market outcomes in Canada. I first show that the adoption of Express Entry, Canada's point-based immigration program, significantly increases new economic immigrants from India. I then estimate the labor market impact of new immigrants using an instrumental variable strategy. Preliminary results show that the surge of new immigrants does not negatively affect employment in local labor markets.​

Julia Zhu is an applied microeconomist. Her research interests are in labor economics, economics of migration, and economics of education.
Julia have several lines of active research that investigate the causes and effects of high-skilled immigration, local impacts of immigration enforcement policies, consequences of climate change and environmental shocks, attitude formation towards immigrants and racial minorities, and population estimation using demographic techniques.

Open to members of the Cornell community only.

In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), an affluent writer, chooses to stay behind in Cuba while his wife and family escape to neighboring Miami. Sergio is pessimistic about the revolution's promise to bring sweeping change to his country, and he squanders his days prowling the streets of Havana looking for female companionship. Trouble erupts when his fling with chaste Elena (Daysi Granados) nearly ruins him after her family accuses Sergio of rape.